A week is a long time in politics, as the saying goes, but this General Election campaign has felt like a couple of lifetimes.

It began towards the end of last year, way before it was meant to.

The blame fell on the ­introduction of fixed-term elections, meaning all surprise had vanished as everyone knew the date with destiny.

But that only tells half the story.

The reason this campaign will go down as one of the most forgettable in living memory is largely due to paranoid party organisers who stage-managed the life out of it.

Fearing there could be another Gillian Duffy encounter or a Prezza farmer-punching moment, they decided to keep politicians away from those dangerous people called voters.

Instead they preferred to play to the cameras with nodding, clapping, hand-picked party members as the backdrop.

The image that perfectly summed up the national response to it all was a Bolton schoolgirl banging her head against a table with boredom when sat next to David Cameron at a staged photo-op.

Had enough: Prime Minister David Cameron helps with a reading lesson at the Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Primary School in Westhoughton (Image: PA)

She spoke for us all.

Not that it was free of cock-ups. Cameron forgot what football team he supported – before compounding it by being unable to answer any questions on the team he remembered he followed, Aston Villa.

Then he blurted out before a Q&A in Yorkshire that this was a “career-defining election”. His script-writers meant him to say “country-defining”.

Ed Miliband stumbled over his lines on the Newsnight debate when asked about Labour’s spending record, then stumbled off the stage.

His “hell yeah” response to whether he could hack it as Prime Minister was excruciating, but not half as much as his Moses-like decision to carve six nondescript pledges on a headstone.

Ed Balls squirmed for ten seconds when asked what the sum of six times seven equals.

And Green Party leader Natalie Bennett suffered two horrific car-crash radio interviews, or “brain-fades”, one of which left her spluttering gibberish for 30 seconds about her own party’s housing policy.

And in one of the live TV debates Nigel Farage managed to deliberately outrage most of the nation by lashing out at foreigners who come here with AIDS.

The only debate being had during the first few weeks of the campaign was how many TV debates we should have and who should be in them.

Or rather why Cameron was bottling it by refusing to take part in a three-header with Miliband and Nick Clegg.

His lamentable answer being he thought it unfair that the Greens were excluded if the Lib Dems were there.

Hug a husky Dave re-visited? Or the fact that he knew he had everything to lose by having his record picked apart by baying hounds?

When the much-trumpeted seven-way leaders’ debate did take place it was a damp squib. All pre-scripted speeches and lame audience questions.

The women, Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood, the Greens’ Natalie Bennett and the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon were the best performers.

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In Sturgeon a new star was born.

Back in 2010 it had been all about “I agree with Nick” but this time, it was “I agree with Nicola.” Even though she wasn’t standing for election.

The effect of Sturgeon-mania in ­Scotland was seismic, with some polls tipping the SNP to take every seat it stood for at this general election.

But the effect south of the border was toxic, with the Tories and their attack dogs claiming the SNP’s usurping of Labour as the leading party in Scotland was a threat to the very existence of the union.

They claimed the only way ­Miliband could govern was with ­Sturgeon’s stiletto on his throat.

Some of the Tory-supporting papers lost all credibility in their efforts to ­out-scare each other on the impact of a Labour victory.

There were hysterical personal attacks on Miliband for having a father who was a leftie academic, a brother who didn’t get enough votes to win the party ­leadership and his inability to eat a bacon butty with grace.

When he agreed to be interviewed by Russell Brand and convinced the ­comedian that telling young people not to vote was counter-productive, Miliband was likened to a devil-worshipper.

Prompted mania: Nicola Sturgeon (Image: Getty)

Proper satire made a comeback on TV though, with Channel 4s Ballot Monkeys – in which Ben Miller playing a Liberal campaign chief on the brink of nervous breakdown stole the show – and Newzoids, an updated version of Spitting Image.

However the funniest TV moments were provided by the soft-focus portraits of the leaders and their wives at home.

Sorry, in their kitchens.

All of their kitchens. In all of their houses. After a few weeks, the campaign began to resemble one long ­Homebase advert.

Although the best news line of the election came out of a cosy kitchen chat, with Cameron telling the BBC’s James Landale this would be the last one he would lead the Tories into.

The Westminster Village gossip machine went into overdrive, salivating at the inevitable jostling to succeed him.

Suddenly, a fat, buffoonish yellow-haired spectre called Boris began to appear on the classroom finger-painting photo-ops.

Many asked why Cameron was doing it?

The feeling being he was merely articulating what his body language was telling us: this politics stuff was boring him now.

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And he wanted to make some serious money and have some serious six-star foreign holidays, not having to pretend to care about the little people.

Hence with a week to go, he bounced on stage with his sleeves rolled up and said he was “bloody up for it.”

It was hard to work out if that was more phoney than the policy he was trying to sell at the time – a vow to make law the claim he wouldn’t be putting up income tax, VAT or National Insurance.